Wednesday, 28 January 2015

In the aftermath of the Greek general election, which put SYRIZA, an anti-austerity left wing party, into power in coalition with far-right Independent Greeks, Dimitris Papadimitriou Professor of European politics at The University of Manchester, explores the situation and assess the possible impact.So, there you have it! Greek bailout politics have come full circle. On Tuesday a new coalition government was sworn in in Athens. SYRIZA has won a landslide victory against their conservative rivals, New Democracy, but have failed to win an outright majority in parliament. The new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, was in need of a coalition partner and it did not take him long to find one. The right wing populist party, Independent Greeks, will join the new government and will be rewarded with a number of senior ministerial appointments. Earlier hopes of a coalition between SYRIZA and the moderate centre left party, To Potami, were dashed the day after the election. Apparently, To Potami was not ‘anti-bailout enough’ for Mr Tsipras.
In Panos Kammenos, the leader of Independent Greeks, the new Prime Minister of Greece finds a partner with impeccable anti-bailout credentials. Mr Kammenos and his party are indeed a product of Greece’s polarised bailout politics. He broke away from New Democracy in 2012 and since then has been a fierce critic of what he regards as Greece’s “occupation” by its creditors. Last year a prominent member of his party accused the EU of being a “bunch of gays”, prompting a humorous rebuff by the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Earlier, Mr Kammenos himself had warned Greeks that they were being sprayed with secret chemicals in order to subdue their opposition to the bailout. He is a die-hard defender of displaying paraphernalia of the Orthodox Church in public buildings and believes that Greece’s future lies in a strategic partnership with his political idol, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, Mr Tsipras became the EU’s youngest leader and the first PM in Greek history who refused to take a religious oath when he assumed office. How can these two agendas co-exist in the same government? Why didn’t Mr Tsipras opt for a more moderate partner? Drawing a parallel to Britain, recent developments in Athens are the equivalent of having Michael Foot and Nigel Farage in charge of renegotiating the UK’s membership of the European Union.
In understanding this farce, one has to look at the effects of the bailout programme on Greek politics. The two-party system that emerged following Greece’s transition to democracy in 1974 has been shattered by the austerity of the past five years. In 2009 the collective strength of the Greek Socialists, PASOK, and New Democracy was in excess of 77% of the vote. On Sunday their share of the vote was just over 31%. The old guard has been swept away, discredited in the eyes of ‘indignant citizens’ as corrupt and subservient to the demands of the ‘Troika’. The implementation of externally-prescribed austerity has led to the electoral annihilation of the mainstream. Anti-bailout rhetoric sells. Even if it comes wrapped in homophobia and religious fervour.
The arrival of Mr Tsipras’ colourful coalition in Greece is the shape of things to come across Europe. Above all it reflects the bankruptcy of the German moralistic austerity dogma. Mr Tsipras and Mrs Merkel are the opposite sides of the same coin. If Mr Tsipras succeeds in changing the dominant economic paradigm in the Eurozone, he will expose the shortcomings of German economic thinking over the past five years. If he fails, Greece’s descent into the abyss will remind Berlin what any good history book will tell you: extreme economics breeds extreme politics. Those who set the foundations of the German economic miracle after the war knew this very well.

Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Manchester University Press is very pleased to announce a new partnership with Kudos.

Kudos
is a free web-based service that helps researchers and authors maximize
the visibility and impact of their published articles online.

For
the author and researcher, Kudos provides a platform for assembling and
creating information to help search, filter, share and supplement their
publications to drive discovery and create digital community. Just as
importantly, it is used for measuring and monitoring the effect of these
activities.

Kudos
is for researchers who want assistance with increasing usage of, and
citations to, their publications. It is also for institutions and
funders looking to increase the impact of the research that they fund
and to help analyse the success of their funding. It is also very useful
for publishers who want to develop closer relationships with their
author communities.

Kudos can helps authors and researchers in three easy steps:

Firstly,
it allows you to add a simple, non-technical explanation of your
publication which will make it easier to find, and more accessible to a
broader audience. Kudos will deposit this additional information about your article with a range of discovery services, all linking back to your publication, to ensure it is even easier to find, read and cite.

Secondly, the platform enables the attachment of rich digital assets that relate to your publication –
data, images, video, podcasts, blog entries – all things that explain
an article and bring it to life. Not only does this enrich things for
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Thirdly,
it helps authors broadcast their work more effectively. Kudos seeks to
standardise the use of social media and support authors with their
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as much as possible.

Monday, 5 January 2015

With the upcoming publication of Britain's lost revolution? author, Daniel Szechi, has written a blog post regarding the subject and the book.

Should Scotland be an independent nation?The Scots people were directly asked this
question last September, and a majority said ‘No’.Had they been asked this question in the autumn
of 1707, when the Scots Parliament was debating whether or not to enter a
constitutional Union with England, there is little doubt that the answer would
have been an overwhelming ‘Yes’.Yet the
Act of Union, solemnly debated and carefully amended in both the Scots and
English Parliaments, finally passed into law in May 1707 despite the clear
hostility of the ordinary people of Scotland.

It was, of
course, a very different world to our own, in which the wishes and aspirations
of the common people counted for little.But it was not just the humble folk who were dismayed and angered by
being ‘bought and sold for English gold’ in the words of a famous song, many of
their social superiors were equally outraged.As far as a sizeable minority of the Scots elite were concerned Scotland
had been betrayed, and it was their duty to rescue the nation and its birthright.

But
how?In the early eighteenth century
there was only one way to oppose a regime with a firm grip on power: armed
rebellion.Therein, however, lay a
complex of problems.The new British
state was one of the most militarily powerful in Europe.A gaggle of Scots nobility and heritors
(gentry) and their tenants and servants, no matter how enthusiastic for the
national cause, would find it very hard to fight the British army and win.Scotland was also a poor nation and the Union
offered the Scots people hope of a better life by commercial access to the
English empire.This would end if the
Scots rebelled.Then there was the
question of what would happen next?If
the anti-Unionist Scots rebelled and succeeded in defeating the British state,
what kind of Scotland did they want to restore?In such an event the old regime in Scotland, subservient to Westminster
and with an absentee monarch, was neither attractive nor feasible.

Britain’s Lost Revolution is about the
answer a coalition of anti-Unionists from within the Scots elite came up with
in answer to these questions and a host of others.We know them simply as the ‘Jacobites’, but
there was a great deal more to their aims and ambitions than the simple
restoration of the exiled Stuart dynasty.Sure, they were willing to bring back James ‘VIII’, the son of James II
and VII, as the king of Scotland, but only as part of a package.This included full scale French military
intervention to enable the rebels to fight the British army with some hope of
success, privileged commercial access to the French colonial empire to replace
the economic advantages of access to the English empire and James’s agreement
to a raft of radical constitutional changes that would have turned Scotland
into a noble republic that would never again be subservient to England.Had the would-be rebels of 1708 succeeded the
British Isles would have been transformed and the modern United Kingdom would
not exist.For a moment then, in March
1708, as the French invasion force set sail for Scotland the fate of everything
we now assume is solid and certain about our constitution and its politics hung
in the balance.This was Britain’s lost
revolution.